This is a rich contribution! What you’re doing in ‘Words of Wonder’ feels like its own form of anti algorithmic resistance tending to the slower, deeper ecosystem of writing instead of feeding the machine’s appetite for velocity. You’re mapping a whole parallel creative infrastructure one built on care, lineage, and communal noticing. Not virality. Not urgency. Not metrics. Actual craft. The way you add in poetry, analysis, collective voices, and those little moments of human weirdness from people’s Notes… absolute gold. It fits beautifully here! ♥️
This is a vital diagnosis Maria... especially that part about 'compliance' over truth.
It hits deep. My novella explores a child building a 'Ministry' to fight erasure in a war zone... trying to archive the people the world wants to forget. He fights to keep the 'high friction' reality alive in a logbook.
But the algorithm... it acts like the ultimate cold bureaucrat. It demands we flatten our grief and our anger just to be seen.
It's a system designed to turn witnesses into 'content'... and we have to resist it.
The full novella is available for free here... https://silentwitnessin.substack.com/p/what-was-here?r=6r3orq (My Substack, "Field Notes From a Fallen Sky," is a free literary project exploring witness and erasure. It'd mean the world to me if you'd join to follow the work.)
This comment hits, especially the part about flattening grief and anger just to be seen. You’re absolutely right! The algorithm functions like a cold bureaucrat with perfect emotional detachment. It doesn’t understand witness. It doesn’t understand the sacred work of remembering. It just optimizes. Your novella sounds powerful and necessary. A child building a ‘Ministry’ to archive the erased is the exact kind of story that exposes what we’re up against. When systems treat human realities as ‘high friction,’ the act of documenting becomes rebellion. You’re doing the thing the machine can’t preserving the messy, uncomfortable truth of being alive. I’ll check out your Substack witness and erasure is a theme more people need to be wrestling with right now. It totally matters. Thank youuu!!!
It's not a new injustice, but a technologically streamlined version of the old one: being born. You are plucked out of nowhere into some invisible lotto, born poor born rich, born male, born female, born white, born non-white, born as a sheep in the flock, born as a wolf, etc. Why would anyone expect that living should be any different than being born?
True. You come out of the womb and immediately get assigned a starting difficulty level like some fucked up character creation shit. At least birth doesn’t pretend to be fair. Algorithms do. Birth doesn’t send you perky little dashboards implying your lack of ‘reach’ is a personal failure. Birth doesn’t rerank your existence based on keyword patterns. Birth doesn’t shadowban your personality. The old unfairness was brutal, but honest. The new unfairness is polite, data driven, and gaslights you into believing it’s objective. That’s the upgrade I’m calling out.
Thank you, Mariah. Awesome synthesis of the situation. Breaking the Overton Window on this matter is difficult when people so willingly conform to the algorithm as the path of least resistance. Keep swinging the hammer of your brilliant mind. - Michael
Thank you, Michael ♥️ you’re right the hardest part isn’t the system, it’s the willingness to melt ourselves to fit it. Conformity is always the path of least resistance, especially when the machine rewards it with a tiny dopamine treat. But the Overton Window cracks because enough people keep tapping the same weak spot. I’ll keep swinging not because I think I can smash the whole thing alone, but because every strike makes it a little more obvious that the frame was crooked to begin with. Appreciate you!
The Overton Window existed long before it was named. There have always been gatekeepers in societies. The big change is this:
The working class was told Put yourself out there. Build a brand. The playing field is open now.
More people than ever before have the opportunity to produce content, but the amount of time a person has to consume content hasn’t grown. Still 24 hours in a day. People using digital creation as a lottery ticket is unfortunate for the overwhelming majority, but it’s not surprising.
I have a small audience. No one owes me a bigger one. I knew that when I started.
You’re totallyyy right, gatekeepers aren’t new. But the difference now is exactly what you’re pointing at the scale, the invisibility, and the false promise of openness. Billions of people were told ‘The internet democratized opportunity. Anyone can build an audience now.’ But what we actually got was a system where exposure feels meritocratic but is mediated by black box scoring we cant see, challenge, or appeal. That’s not the same as old school gatekeeping. You’re right that no one is owed an audience that part hasn’t changed. But what has changed is that many people blame themselves for outcomes they never had meaningful control over in the first place. They internalize machine logic as a personal verdict. Some people accept the small audience and keep doing the work. Some people break under the weight of it. And some never realize they were downranked before a single human had the chance to decide whether they resonated or not. Thats the part I’m trying to surface not entitlement to attention, but transparency about the systems that decide who even gets the chance to be seen. I love this comment, adding depth to the topic. Thank you!!
I absolutely adore this comment, thank you. Half the time it really does feel like a brain to brain file transfer and I’m just the stunned court stenographer typing it out.
Mariah, this is powerful. You lifted me at a moment when it mattered, and I will not forget it. The way you describe the hidden class system created by algorithms, the sorting, the suppression, and the quiet self-doubt it causes, is the truth so many of us feel but carry alone. Thank you for standing up for the humans behind the work, not the metrics. 🤍🖤✨
awwww this makes me really happy Cel ♥️ And for real, I’m not stopping. If anything, comments like yours make me double the fuck down. Most people don’t realize how much silent damage this stuff does the self doubt, the shrinking, the ‘maybe I’m just not good enough’ spiral. More than half the internet is walking around with an invisible algorithmic bruise. That’s exactly why I write the way I do. If I can name the thing that’s been weighing on people quietly, and lift even one person back into their own power, then the machine didn’t win today. Thank you so much!!! It matters more than the metrics ever will.
Thank you for saying this, Mariah. The way you name what so many of us carry quietly is powerful. You help people recognise their own worth again, and that is real work. I’m grateful you keep writing the way you do. ♥️🌿✨
“When a system keeps rewarding the same aesthetics, tones, and personalities … people start sanding off their edges to survive.” Recursive systems of thought affect not just the individual struggling to survive, it limits our society. It fosters a mono culture of mind, susceptible like all mono cultures to challenges of disease, weather, overproduction, depletion of the resources. Creativity is strength, diversity of thought is resilience. The algorithms are self-reinforcing processes that destroy systems they dominate.
YES exactly this!! You captured the part most never articulate: when individuals sand down their edges to survive the machine, the entire culture loses surface area. We don’t just get safer content we get weaker ecosystems. A monoculture of mind is fragile by design. It collapses under stress. It can’t adapt. It can’t imagine. It can’t revolt. Once a platform starts rewarding sameness, sameness becomes the path of least resistance. Then it becomes the norm. Then it becomes prison. Creativity is strength, diversity of thought is resilience. And the irony is, the systems built to ‘optimize engagement’ eventually cannibalize the very creativity they depend on. Thank you!
Another upside of this mess is that those of us who enjoyed reading the novels of the 1960s “new wave” science fiction boom now find ourselves the protagonists of those novels.
I’m also sure that Robert Silverberg and Philip k Dick would not have been sorry to have missed seeing their works manifested on this scale.
See “Ubik” and “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” by Philip K Dick. See also “The Stochastic Man” and “Thorns” by Robert Silverberg.
Er mer gerd, yes!! We really are living inside the weirdest mash up of Philip K. Dick and late stage Silicon Valley fanfiction. The upside (if we can call it that) is exactly what you said the people who grew up devouring New Wave scifi suddenly woke up to find themselves cast as the protagonists of the stories they thought were metaphors. Dick warned us about manufactured realities, shifting identities, invisible systems rewriting the rules but even he didn’t have to witness a world where the algorithm became the ambient atmosphere. Ubik and The Three Stigmata feel less like fiction now and more like field manuals. Silverberg, too especially The Stochastic Man would have had a field day watching probabilistic models decide who matters online. Yep, none of them would have wanted to see their predictions scaled into infrastructure. Their cautionary tales became blueprints. But here we are living in the B-plot of a 1970s paperback, except the cover art was way cooler.
I knew (to some degree) you’d be a PKD Robert Silverberg aficionado. it was a solid bet given your writing, that you may have cracked a copy of “The Stochastic man”.
Every time I listen to people discuss the fact that their lives are being cannibalized by their increasingly Subscription-based existence, I immediately think of PKD’s “UBIK”.
Thanks for your insightful response. As usual, anything from you is humorous and charming in its interpretation and expression.
Absolutely beautiful! And fierce in that quiet way that only a pantoum can pull off. The looping form makes the message hit even harder silence isn’t passive, it’s a weapon. It can wound, disarm, or protect depending on who’s holding it. Your framing of silence as both violence and resistance, amazing. Your poem reminds me that silence itself has edges, strategy, intention. It’s not always absence sometimes it’s refusal. Sometimes it’s preservation. Sometimes it’s the only tool left when the ‘mesh’ you describe becomes too tight for clean speech. There’s real power in the contrast you’re drawing fire in the eyes, quiet in the stance.
Thank you Ms Continelli. Your essay really got my attention.
Thank you for checking it out, Erik!
Words of Wonder - Poetry in Motion: https://open.substack.com/pub/drkimberlyhandy/p/words-of-wonder-week-six-november?r=2io6s&utm_medium=ios
This is a rich contribution! What you’re doing in ‘Words of Wonder’ feels like its own form of anti algorithmic resistance tending to the slower, deeper ecosystem of writing instead of feeding the machine’s appetite for velocity. You’re mapping a whole parallel creative infrastructure one built on care, lineage, and communal noticing. Not virality. Not urgency. Not metrics. Actual craft. The way you add in poetry, analysis, collective voices, and those little moments of human weirdness from people’s Notes… absolute gold. It fits beautifully here! ♥️
This is a vital diagnosis Maria... especially that part about 'compliance' over truth.
It hits deep. My novella explores a child building a 'Ministry' to fight erasure in a war zone... trying to archive the people the world wants to forget. He fights to keep the 'high friction' reality alive in a logbook.
But the algorithm... it acts like the ultimate cold bureaucrat. It demands we flatten our grief and our anger just to be seen.
It's a system designed to turn witnesses into 'content'... and we have to resist it.
The full novella is available for free here... https://silentwitnessin.substack.com/p/what-was-here?r=6r3orq (My Substack, "Field Notes From a Fallen Sky," is a free literary project exploring witness and erasure. It'd mean the world to me if you'd join to follow the work.)
This comment hits, especially the part about flattening grief and anger just to be seen. You’re absolutely right! The algorithm functions like a cold bureaucrat with perfect emotional detachment. It doesn’t understand witness. It doesn’t understand the sacred work of remembering. It just optimizes. Your novella sounds powerful and necessary. A child building a ‘Ministry’ to archive the erased is the exact kind of story that exposes what we’re up against. When systems treat human realities as ‘high friction,’ the act of documenting becomes rebellion. You’re doing the thing the machine can’t preserving the messy, uncomfortable truth of being alive. I’ll check out your Substack witness and erasure is a theme more people need to be wrestling with right now. It totally matters. Thank youuu!!!
It's not a new injustice, but a technologically streamlined version of the old one: being born. You are plucked out of nowhere into some invisible lotto, born poor born rich, born male, born female, born white, born non-white, born as a sheep in the flock, born as a wolf, etc. Why would anyone expect that living should be any different than being born?
True. You come out of the womb and immediately get assigned a starting difficulty level like some fucked up character creation shit. At least birth doesn’t pretend to be fair. Algorithms do. Birth doesn’t send you perky little dashboards implying your lack of ‘reach’ is a personal failure. Birth doesn’t rerank your existence based on keyword patterns. Birth doesn’t shadowban your personality. The old unfairness was brutal, but honest. The new unfairness is polite, data driven, and gaslights you into believing it’s objective. That’s the upgrade I’m calling out.
Damn. Ouch. Thanks.
Lol, no problem.
Thank you, Mariah. Awesome synthesis of the situation. Breaking the Overton Window on this matter is difficult when people so willingly conform to the algorithm as the path of least resistance. Keep swinging the hammer of your brilliant mind. - Michael
Thank you, Michael ♥️ you’re right the hardest part isn’t the system, it’s the willingness to melt ourselves to fit it. Conformity is always the path of least resistance, especially when the machine rewards it with a tiny dopamine treat. But the Overton Window cracks because enough people keep tapping the same weak spot. I’ll keep swinging not because I think I can smash the whole thing alone, but because every strike makes it a little more obvious that the frame was crooked to begin with. Appreciate you!
Well put. Definitely seeing something similar in my own perspective.
Once you see the machinery, you can’t unsee it!
Very powerful stuff!
Thank you Stephen ♥️
The Overton Window existed long before it was named. There have always been gatekeepers in societies. The big change is this:
The working class was told Put yourself out there. Build a brand. The playing field is open now.
More people than ever before have the opportunity to produce content, but the amount of time a person has to consume content hasn’t grown. Still 24 hours in a day. People using digital creation as a lottery ticket is unfortunate for the overwhelming majority, but it’s not surprising.
I have a small audience. No one owes me a bigger one. I knew that when I started.
You’re totallyyy right, gatekeepers aren’t new. But the difference now is exactly what you’re pointing at the scale, the invisibility, and the false promise of openness. Billions of people were told ‘The internet democratized opportunity. Anyone can build an audience now.’ But what we actually got was a system where exposure feels meritocratic but is mediated by black box scoring we cant see, challenge, or appeal. That’s not the same as old school gatekeeping. You’re right that no one is owed an audience that part hasn’t changed. But what has changed is that many people blame themselves for outcomes they never had meaningful control over in the first place. They internalize machine logic as a personal verdict. Some people accept the small audience and keep doing the work. Some people break under the weight of it. And some never realize they were downranked before a single human had the chance to decide whether they resonated or not. Thats the part I’m trying to surface not entitlement to attention, but transparency about the systems that decide who even gets the chance to be seen. I love this comment, adding depth to the topic. Thank you!!
Yes, powerful words that flow like telepathic images. Effortless download from your mind to ours. ❤️
I absolutely adore this comment, thank you. Half the time it really does feel like a brain to brain file transfer and I’m just the stunned court stenographer typing it out.
Mariah, this is powerful. You lifted me at a moment when it mattered, and I will not forget it. The way you describe the hidden class system created by algorithms, the sorting, the suppression, and the quiet self-doubt it causes, is the truth so many of us feel but carry alone. Thank you for standing up for the humans behind the work, not the metrics. 🤍🖤✨
awwww this makes me really happy Cel ♥️ And for real, I’m not stopping. If anything, comments like yours make me double the fuck down. Most people don’t realize how much silent damage this stuff does the self doubt, the shrinking, the ‘maybe I’m just not good enough’ spiral. More than half the internet is walking around with an invisible algorithmic bruise. That’s exactly why I write the way I do. If I can name the thing that’s been weighing on people quietly, and lift even one person back into their own power, then the machine didn’t win today. Thank you so much!!! It matters more than the metrics ever will.
Thank you for saying this, Mariah. The way you name what so many of us carry quietly is powerful. You help people recognise their own worth again, and that is real work. I’m grateful you keep writing the way you do. ♥️🌿✨
“When a system keeps rewarding the same aesthetics, tones, and personalities … people start sanding off their edges to survive.” Recursive systems of thought affect not just the individual struggling to survive, it limits our society. It fosters a mono culture of mind, susceptible like all mono cultures to challenges of disease, weather, overproduction, depletion of the resources. Creativity is strength, diversity of thought is resilience. The algorithms are self-reinforcing processes that destroy systems they dominate.
YES exactly this!! You captured the part most never articulate: when individuals sand down their edges to survive the machine, the entire culture loses surface area. We don’t just get safer content we get weaker ecosystems. A monoculture of mind is fragile by design. It collapses under stress. It can’t adapt. It can’t imagine. It can’t revolt. Once a platform starts rewarding sameness, sameness becomes the path of least resistance. Then it becomes the norm. Then it becomes prison. Creativity is strength, diversity of thought is resilience. And the irony is, the systems built to ‘optimize engagement’ eventually cannibalize the very creativity they depend on. Thank you!
Another upside of this mess is that those of us who enjoyed reading the novels of the 1960s “new wave” science fiction boom now find ourselves the protagonists of those novels.
I’m also sure that Robert Silverberg and Philip k Dick would not have been sorry to have missed seeing their works manifested on this scale.
See “Ubik” and “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” by Philip K Dick. See also “The Stochastic Man” and “Thorns” by Robert Silverberg.
Er mer gerd, yes!! We really are living inside the weirdest mash up of Philip K. Dick and late stage Silicon Valley fanfiction. The upside (if we can call it that) is exactly what you said the people who grew up devouring New Wave scifi suddenly woke up to find themselves cast as the protagonists of the stories they thought were metaphors. Dick warned us about manufactured realities, shifting identities, invisible systems rewriting the rules but even he didn’t have to witness a world where the algorithm became the ambient atmosphere. Ubik and The Three Stigmata feel less like fiction now and more like field manuals. Silverberg, too especially The Stochastic Man would have had a field day watching probabilistic models decide who matters online. Yep, none of them would have wanted to see their predictions scaled into infrastructure. Their cautionary tales became blueprints. But here we are living in the B-plot of a 1970s paperback, except the cover art was way cooler.
I knew (to some degree) you’d be a PKD Robert Silverberg aficionado. it was a solid bet given your writing, that you may have cracked a copy of “The Stochastic man”.
Every time I listen to people discuss the fact that their lives are being cannibalized by their increasingly Subscription-based existence, I immediately think of PKD’s “UBIK”.
Thanks for your insightful response. As usual, anything from you is humorous and charming in its interpretation and expression.
Keep swinging, chick.
It absolutely feels like we've slid into a Philip K. Dick story. Total Recall comes to mind. The edges of what's real are melting.
I've been thinking a lot about Philip K Dick in recent years. He was a prophet.
Absolutely beautiful! And fierce in that quiet way that only a pantoum can pull off. The looping form makes the message hit even harder silence isn’t passive, it’s a weapon. It can wound, disarm, or protect depending on who’s holding it. Your framing of silence as both violence and resistance, amazing. Your poem reminds me that silence itself has edges, strategy, intention. It’s not always absence sometimes it’s refusal. Sometimes it’s preservation. Sometimes it’s the only tool left when the ‘mesh’ you describe becomes too tight for clean speech. There’s real power in the contrast you’re drawing fire in the eyes, quiet in the stance.